YOUR TRAINING CANNOT SAVE YOU

I hefted the box off of the rollers. More boxes streamed down, the cardboard flowing over the plastic, and in the closed space of the trailer it sounded like rain.

The box was an irreg - long and narrow, shiny in the orange light of the lamp at the entrance. The picture on it showed a curl bar, a kind of barbell with kinks for gripping and emphasizing the biceps.

I stared at the handles, envying their knurling, imagined the luxury of friction digging into my palm. Then I clenched my grip around the smooth, hard, angular surface, and tried not to drop it.

*

Originally I had in mind to write an angry letter to Crossfit. It was going to be about how much fun it could be, how hybrid training truly does make sense and how awesome it is. And then I was going to rant about how Crossfit couldn't save you; how you could learn to do seven hundred push ups and deadlift until you died, and how none of that actually translated to the real world of lifting struggling things with no handles.

Seriously, bro, where are the handles on your uniform?

I learned, in doing a little cursory research, that Crossfit actually does have the power to program for Strongman-type workouts, the one kind of training that probably translates the most into real world strength. Which forced me, then, to sit back and think about what my problem was.

The temptation remains to blame Crossfit. It's a target, and for sure, the fact that they can program for strongman work doesn't mean that they are. For that matter, the fact that they're known for olympic lifts and broken gymnastics only serves to cement my point. An outfit that talks all about preparing for the real world that doesn't teach how to use that preparation in the real world isn't really doing anything other than getting you jack'd and rip'd and looking good naked while charging you lots and lots of money.

Which is their right, of course.

But in thinking about the problem, I'm forced to concede that this is way bigger than just Crossfit. This is something that applies to the industry at large. Doesn't matter if you're at Planet Fitness or Gold's Gym or your local powerlifter's dungeon or wherever. I've been in all those places, and not a single blessed one has ever really prepared me for doing the things I needed to do when I needed to do them.

Being prepared for the real world is so much more than WODs and various bells. And I think that, whatever way you use to train, you ultimately owe it to yourself to spice it up with real world work.

But to tell you the truth, I don't really know what that means. My temptation is to prescribe odd-object training as a cure-all - lifting sandbags and Atlas Stones and such. But honestly? Those aren't perfect answers.

Maybe the only real way to develop real strength is to go out into the real world. Shovel your driveway. Walk barefoot in the woods and find a heavy stone to carry. Play with your children. Wrestle your spouse.

The bottom line is this, folks: you can't just train in your gym and then leave your training there. You have to find ways to carry it and express it, as much as you can.

Otherwise, what the hell's the point?

Happy 2014! or, Why I Resolve NOT to Join the Resolvers

HEY EVERYONE I'M ALIVE

True story: 96 percent of surveyed people prefer live Ryan to dead.

I survived 2013. Here are some accomplishments:

• I rocked out NaNoWriMo for the eighth freaking year. I tell you: I have a fever, and it can only be cured with MOAR WORDCOUNT.
• I learned that I could hold down three different jobs if I had to.
• Further, I learned that I really don't like to.
• I got a new car!
• I started this blog!
• I learned how to do a handstand!
• I constructed a ring set/suspension trainer set-up for pennies on the dollar, using methods that I found online!

All things considered, it was a pretty awesome year. As usual, it had its ups and downs: I left behind a job that was steady to do a job that turned out not-steady, and as usual money is an issue. But that's life. If I genuinely made enough money to put my debts away for good and afford good groceries and send a little something home to my parents... well, it wouldn't be me. I wouldn't know how to handle those circumstances.

But that was all last year! 2014 stands before us now, with all its wonder and potential and disappointment and maybe some of the good madness that Neil Gaiman says he hopes for. These first days are the days of hope and potential, when you think you can finally "get in shape" and "write that novel" (okay, maybe that's just me).

Perhaps I have some kind of epic resolution up my sleeve? Some secret that's been inside of me for so long that will now burst forth from me and lead me down the path to awesome?

Hahahaha.

No.

Verified statistics from the University of Scranton indicate that only eight percent of people who make their resolutions actually succeed in doing them. Eight. Percent. You can fudge the numbers a little when you account for people who have a little success, but as for me? Lord knows I could use some changes, but I think I'll take a path that has lower odds of failure than 92%.

Ain't nobody got time for this

You gotta wonder, though: why do so many people fail at this? Here we are. It's the beginning of a New Year. It's tradition to look upon this upcoming time with unvarnished optimism and a sense of renewed purpose, so what gives? How does all this social capital go to waste?

Well, I've been reading a bunch of blogs about this, and I think it comes down to two or three things.

1. The goals that we set in our resolutions are optimized for failure. They fail the SMART test - they are not Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, or Time-Sensitive, and successful goals have to be all of these.
2. The goals are too big. We all know about the New Year's gym rush when everyone goes to hit the gym and get fit and finally lose that weight and 'get healthy.' Problem is, 'get healthy' is psychological code for 'look great naked' (it is, don't lie), and people don't understand that this isn't something that happens in a short time. It takes months of consistent effort and eating right, possibly years, and nobody walks into this expecting that.
3. The act of setting the goal in the first place is problematic, because more often than not it's set up without any kind of prior effort from the last year. We set the resolution to write that novel, to knit that scarf, to take up a new class or a hobby... out of nowhere. If these resolutions were truly so vital to us, so important as we think they are, then we would be doing things in the previous year to move toward them. That we haven't done this shows how little they really mean to us, and without that core of meaning, you have no chance of long term success at all.

To tell you the truth, I used to set goals all the time. But they're a limited tool. Getting my body to the place where I want it, getting my writing career to the place where I want it... they aren't things with set end points. If the day comes that I get jacked, I won't want to lose that; if the day comes that I write a bestseller or, shoot, complete a draft, I won't be content with just that one thing.

It's the process that ultimately matters. It's the development and refinement of psychological systems that gets us to where we want to go and keeps us there.

I've made up my mind to develop my joints and my mobility, and because I already have a system of working out in place, this will happen. I've made up my mind to have a completed second draft of a story, at least, and because I have a writing system in place, this will happen.

Because when you do things effectively, January 1 isn't an epic event at all. It's just another day where you put on your hard hat, and go the hell to work.

I'm in. Are you? What kind of things do you want to accomplish this year? Do you have systems in place already to deal with them? Or, failing that, what kind of system are you willing to build?

NaNoWriMo Hiatus

What's up, everyone?

This is just a quick little announcement post to let you all know that I'm not dead, but I'm going off to write a novel and I won't have much time for blogging.

I wish I had something suitable and dramatic for my temporary exit, but I got nothing. Hopefully, though, when I come out on the other side, I'll have a finished draft rather than just a bunch of words.

I did it, once, before. I don't see why I couldn't do it again.

KAAAAAAAAAANG!

As a fitness professional, I have a front row seat to a lot of psychology. People and their bodies are a fascinating phenomenon to watch. They really are. People have entirely different reactions to the same things.

Casting Call

So, uh. It's about to get all close and personal up in here. But, you know, it's a blog, so that's how it goes from time to time.

I don't know if you've noticed, but National Novel Writing Month is coming up. For those of you who don't know, it's a month dedicated to writing long form fiction. There's a site for it and everything, and the idea is to churn out fifty thousand words of fiction. Or non-fiction. Or five ten thousand-word stories. Or ten five thousand-word stories. The whole thing's become rather nebulous as time has gone by.

Also got bit by the 8-Bit Bug

I first heard about it when I was in college. I was reading web comics - always a good use of time in college - and one of the writers mentioned that he was going to be attempting this crazy thing where he wrote a novel in a month. I did some research and signed up on a lark.

I finished it - made it past the 50K mark. The other writer did not. That was pretty awesome.

I've done it every year since then, and every year I've made it through to fifty thousand words. Pretty cool, huh? Seven years of survival. You'd think I had seven novels just up and ready to go, and with self-publishing becoming the next big thing, I should be just raking in money hand over fist, right?

Well... not so much.

You see, a strange thing has happened to my writing. I find, as time goes by, that I settle into this cycle. I go for broke in November. I spend December as a broken writer, not able to put a single sentence down. The rest of the year is spent reclaiming my identity, slowly but surely, until I finally arrive at November, fresh and ready to blow myself to smithereens.

It's a real problem, the burn-out. And while there isn't an easy fix for it, there is a simple one: the grit and grind of a daily writing habit. I've read about Seinfeld's tactic of using a calendar and making sure he marks every day that he works on material, creating a chain of productivity that requires relatively little willpower. It's all about maintaining the habit at that point.

I suspect that I will be able to maintain my writing past November, and it's a prospect I look forward to with great eagerness.

Because Hyperbole and a Half legitimizes... everything.

But there's another problem, a new pattern emerging in my longer works. I get this idea about a world, about its quirks and the kind of story I'd like to tell in it. And I start to tell it... and it just peters out into nothing. Frustrated, I try another angle, another start. Same thing happens. I end up with fifty thousand words of beginnings and middles, but no ends, in fact, not even a decent arc to show. Seven empty promises that took seven years and 350,000 words to say that they weren't coming true.

And I've been thinking about it, really digging in to figure out what is going on, why this is so hard for me. I love writing long fiction. I love spending time with compelling characters, and watching them hit soaring heights that just don't happen in short fiction.

And that is precisely my problem. I don't know how to write compelling characters - all I ever write is myself.

That sounds depressing. Have a puppy.

93% of all sads disappear in the presence of Corgis.

All my protagonists have more than just a piece of me - they're a piece of me combined with lots of other smaller pieces. My first novel, a sort of "the Crusades, but fantasy!" piece, was about a warrior monk who went forth to have his absolute faith challenged by the horrible things he was seeing. That was me dealing with college. The next one was a young man waking up in the future to find that he's been given a badass cybernetic body and is being expected to fight in a war. That was me dealing with the fact that my brother went off to join the Marines.

Another was an inversion of Twilight, a vampire romance told from a male perspective. I actually got a real kick out of that one - who better to write a romance than someone who's never been successfully romantic, or been romanced in turn? - but the protagonist was me too. Poor, snarky, and spent a little too much time obsessing over pull ups.

True story: this image actually inspired the novel that year.

The bottom line, if I'm honest about it, is that I'm not interested in keeping up this same pattern. I need to change it, which means I need to address my lack of characters. Unfortunately, I'm a little handicapped on this. I'm too sane to have voices in my head, reacting like an entirely separate person. I dunno how the hell my friends do it. I don't really know how anyone does that.

But what I do understand are systems. And I have an idea - I'm going to start looking for prompts and writing my characters in reaction to those prompts. I've got a whole 19 days yet to figure out MC-kun sounds and if there's an MC-chan in the mix somewhere and what the hell any of it means.

Maybe it won't make a difference, and I'm just doomed again. But it's a different approach than what I used before, so there's the chance that things can be different. It's a shot I gotta take.

So, tell me. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Am I on the right track or am I lost in the woods? What about you? Do you have voices (and have you seen a doctor)? Or do you rely on systems to write out your characters?

The Flip Side

Here is a story that you are probably familiar with.

It's five o'clock. You have done your due diligence to your duties as a functioning member of society. You have done the job and you have done it well.

Take a moment to applaud yourself. It's cool. I'll wait.

Because America is on a big time health kick, you decide that you're going to go the gym tonight. You've made a habit of going, and you feel like you might just do awesome tonight. Your scale hasn't moved very much, but it doesn't matter. Tonight's the night where something awesome happens.

Now, this story splits a little bit depending on who you are. If you're a woman, you probably wander over to the treadmill because you ate your salad, and then you accidentally had a breadstick. You have officially landed at 1201 calories, and that just won't do.

If you're a dude, you are probably burning to look like Ryan Reynolds, or Chris Evans or any of the other built stars. And you totally know how it's gonna happen. Yep. Men's Muscular Magazine, or whatever periodical you subscribe to, has listed a perfect, six day split routine where you work on one part one day and another the next. And your'e good about it. You don't even skip leg day.

Either way, we can draw these stories back together along a single common thread: the odds are really good that they've been hitting the gym every day this past week.

And you feel like you have to. You don't compromise on the other areas of your life - you still have to work, you still have your social life to consider. You can do it all.

Of course you can't.

Maybe it won't happen today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or even in the next week. But something will go wrong. You'll start to notice that your lifts aren't moving as smoothly as they were before, or that your runs leave you more tired than they used to. The vitality and health that you feel like you should have will not be there.

And the temptation is to say that it's not normal, it's a mistake, it won't work that way and you can just power through it. But your body isn't going to let you get away with that.

Thus, we are brought to the other side of the coin: active rest.

Pictured Above: Not Active Rest

I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit. You don't get stronger or faster when you work out. Strength and speed and power and all that jazz are adaptations to stress. Exercise is the stressor. And when you are stressed, the best way to recover is to get some rest.

Resting is the other side of intensity. Where you push with the utmost intensity, you stress yourself to a greater degree. Your body responds by recovering you beyond that threshold, to prepare for the next bout of stress. This, in turn, allows you to be more active, which necessitates further rest. It's a virtuous cycle.

But on the other hand, who really, truly wants to sit around and do nothing all day? One day, yeah, that's fun. But it will lose its charm, I promise. And besides, you're working your body hard to get the adaptations you want. Don't you deserve the chance to see it in action?

Hence, active rest. Active rest is the idea of putting your body through the motions. You're not looking to stress yourself, but you are looking to get your blood flowing, and the nutrients flowing from one place to the next.

And the neat thing is it can be anything you want. You can go for a walk, go for a hike, play some Ultimate, ride a bike. Whatever it takes that you enjoy doing that gets the blood pumping. It'll work.

So! What kind of stuff do you do when you workout? And what kind of stuff would you like to do for fun to relax from the stress?

TMI - Too Much Intensity

You know what our problem is on a physical level?

We don't understand the notion of intensity.

Our notion of intensity is defined based around the numbers on a treadmill. We think to ourselves, jack this number up and keep it there, and the longer we keep it there the better we're going to be.

The problem with this? The problem is that it's far too much stress for far too long. Intensity works best in brief, short spurts of activity. Lifting weights, sprinting, things like that. Driving yourself down into the ground like that has a tendency to cause stresses all throughout your body, beyond the scale of what it can actually heal.

In the case of running on a treadmill, you're flirting with overuse injuries as you keep crashing down from foot to foot. If it's a heel strike pattern, you're smashing your knees. If it's toe strike pattern, you're flirting with injuries in your foot.

This isn't even getting into the cortisol issue. Cortisol is a great hormone, not bad in and of itself. It triggers adrenaline, and in the proper doses is incredibly beneficial. The problem, though, is that we end up dosing ourselves with far more cortisol than we actually need.

It's not that the substance is bad. It's the dosage.

In the doses that we expose ourselves to, cortisol causes a number of different problems:

• It leads to proteolysis, the breaking down of muscular tissue into smaller amino acid chains.
• It reduces bone formation, creating a metabolic environment that favors osteoporosis.
• It increases blood pressure.
• Most importantly: it interferes with your sleep, resulting in a messed-up hormonal reset. The growth hormone you secrete when you sleep and the rebalancing between estrogen and testosterone is impinged. You get less restful sleep, and you're weaker in your daily life.

You end up in a vicious cycle - you're weaker, so you have to work harder, which stresses you more, which makes your sleep worse, which makes you weaker.

It's not a happy place to be. But we tend to think that we have to be there. We can't rest. Rest is for the weak and the dead, and we're neither one of those, are we?

Here's reality: intensity is only one side of the coin. There is another side as well. Becoming truly fit requires you to understand both sides.

What is the other side?

Leave your thoughts below, and stay tuned...